New Computer

Today I took delivery of a new computer for my music, to take the place of the old one that was showing real signs of stress. The new one is custom built by Scan. It is in a 4U rackmount case and has an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X processor, on an ASUS motherboard and with a Radeon R5230 fanless graphics card. Audio I/O is via an M-Audio Mtrack 8, and MIDI via a Prodipe 4i/4o.

That graphics card was a significant problem, as it was difficult to get hold of one, but it was worth the hassle.

The machine arrived quite early this morning, extremely well packaged. They had even put bubble wrap inside for additional shock protection - with a very clear warning on the top! Looking inside it has been very neatly assembled, no random loose wires. I added a CDROM drive I already had, and a second SSD, both of these robbed from the older machine. The SSD has all my working project files on it.

I installed devuan Linix 2.0.0 rc without any issues at all - no more inexplicable SystemD failures. I then built up the system with all my favourite programs. This was the most time consuming part of the install.

And the performance? Stunning! The machine is totally silent. There wasn't so much as a whisper when maxing out all 8 cores compiling the latest Rosegarden image! One of my most complex projects has to run at 5.33mS Latency on the old machine, and I didn't dare touch anything while it was going. On the new one I can run it at 1.33mS, and shuffle various windows around without a single Xrun.

Hi Dave,I suspect there's been some bias in the reports you've been reading AMD rather lost its way in the past, but the new machines really are good. As for Linux not being good for audio - that depends entirely on what you are looking for. The platform doesn't have all the bells, whistles and eye-candy that some people seem to think is essential, but for sheer grunt, nothing gets you closer to the metal.

Thanks for your comment resitorman. I'm still making a few minor 'comfort' tweaks here and there, but overall the system is running very well. It feels so much 'lighter' if you know what I mean

Folderol wrote:Hi Dave,I suspect there's been some bias in the reports you've been reading AMD rather lost its way in the past, but the new machines really are good. As for Linux not being good for audio - that depends entirely on what you are looking for. The platform doesn't have all the bells, whistles and eye-candy that some people seem to think is essential, but for sheer grunt, nothing gets you closer to the metal.

Thanks for your comment resitorman. I'm still making a few minor 'comfort' tweaks here and there, but overall the system is running very well. It feels so much 'lighter' if you know what I mean

I was not clear sorry, (getting late, old y'know) I meant that AMD might be better optimized FOR Linux and therefore you went that route.

I am glad AMD is not an "audio fail" ! Bit hissed off with some things I had read because my home build is an Asus MOBO with an AMD 6core 3G Black. Seems pretty slick on W7 to me.

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind your choice of distro? I'm running Ubuntu studio with the low latency kernel, but always interested in how other linux audio folks are configuring their systems since to this point I've been taking the "if it ain't broke" approach since I got my first linux box running (after several other distro fails) 8 years ago.

I've been using debian for years, but got fed up with all the weird ways systemd could break things. The final straw was when my 'office' computer suddenly could no longer automount USB sticks after what should have been an ordinary update after security warnings.

I decided that the next time I did a fresh install I'd try devuan - so far it's been brilliant.